Based upon Kenyan ethnography, this article examines the gap between the bioethics aversion to value transfers in clinical trials, and research participants' and researchers' expectations of these. This article focuses upon so-called 'transport reimbursement' (TR): monetary payments to participants that are framed as mere refund of transport expenses, but which are of considerable value to recipients. The interest in this case lies not so much in the unsurprising gap between regulatory norms and poor study subjects' lives, but in the way in which this discrepancy between bioethical discourse and materialities of survival is silenced. In spite of the general awareness that TR indeed is about the material value of research, about value calculation, and expectations of return, it is not publicly discussed as such - unless ironically, in jest, or in private. This double-blindness around 'reimbursement' has provoked discussions among ethicists and anthropologists, some of which propose that the work that generates scientific value should be recognised as labour and participants, accordingly, paid. Here, this paper argues that such a re-vision of trial participation as work rather than as a gift for the public good, risks abrogating the possibility of 'the public' that is not only a precondition of public medical science, but also its potential product. The supposedly radical solution of tearing away the veils of misrecognition that 'free' gifting ideology lays upon the realities of free labour, though analytically plausible, fails to recognise the utopian openings within clinical trial transactions that point beyond the present - towards larger forms of social association, and towards future alignments of scientific possibilities and human lives.

This paper focuses on an unsettling example of experimental labour - the Human Landing Catch (HLC). The HLC is a cheap and reliable technique to produce data on mosquito densities in a defined area. It requires only a human volunteer to sit over night with his legs exposed, a headlamp to spot mosquitoes, and a rubber tube and plastic cup to catch them as they come to feed on him. The HLC formed the central methodological and operational strategy for a malaria control that took place in Dar es Salaam, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This paper analyses the epistemic and economic value of this experimental scenario by examining in detail the work it entails. In conceptualizing the different species of productivity associated with the HLC, of particular interest is the surprising fact that he is there. This paper argues that the interplay of mobility and immobility offers a way to rethink the value of research within interlocking circulations of capital, science, mosquitoes and men.

Speculation has become a normalized occupational strategy and quotidian economic rationality that extends throughout society. Although there are many contemporary articulations of speculation, this article focuses on contract labor as a domain of financialization. Seen through this lens, contract labor can be understood as a speculative investment strategy wherein individuals leverage whatever assets they have at their disposal-savings, time, bodily health-to capture economic advantages. In particular, we explore the speculative practices of healthy individuals who enroll in pharmaceutical drug trials as their primary or critical source of income. Mobilizing speculative logics to maximize the money they can earn from their clinical trial participation, these contract workers employ what we term a . This speculative calculus valorizes fictional projections of significant long-term future income over present financial opportunities. For the economically precarious individuals in our study, we argue that rather than effectively increasing their income, speculation on contract work serves a compensatory function, providing an important-but ultimately inadequate-sense of control over market conditions that thrive upon workers' economic insecurity.

This paper uses a comparative ethnographic approach to explore the ways in which social media enables new economic strategies that capitalize on women's traditional forms of reliance within their local communities. We use ethnographic examples from northern Chile, southeast Italy, and south India to show how women are successful in establishing small but prestigious entrepreneurial activities by using social media to respond to local social and cultural needs. Women use social media to transform both conventional work practices and individuals' notions of work in ways that overcome important structural constraints they face in their respective communities. These findings contrast with optimistic analyses that suggest online platforms decrease global inequalities through bringing disadvantaged people into global economic flows. This article demonstrates the effective ways in which individuals use social media to gradually change local norms related to gender and work while making small but important gains towards economic stability. This process is related to important shifts in sociality that have resulted from social media use within local communities. By focusing on entrepreneurship and gendered aspects of online economic exchange, we develop an understanding of what happens when longstanding expectations for gendered work meet commerce made possible through new media.

This special issue is driven by a curiosity about the role of computational forms - practices, logics, technologies, and infrastructures - in social life and how they mediate issues of trust and mistrust: designated . Through a series of ethnographic encounters, its contributors describe how (mis)trust is rendered as an issue of concern by various actors as it is problematized, conceptualized, narrated, and designed for. In doing so, the papers analyse the work (mis)trust does in these settings, with a focus on the role of computational thinking within public discourses on democratic elections, the use of computational technologies in establishing bureaucratic order, the computational practices at play in the production of coding subjectivities, and the computational artefacts that assure data circulations within digital infrastructures. This introduction argues for a more expansive understanding of the relation between trust and mistrust in the digital age, countering the oftentimes default rendering of these concepts as antonymic. Instead, it argues that they live in a mutable relation. Despite prevailing technosolutionist approaches to (mis)trust, it cannot, we suggest, be solved for, resolved, or even eviscerated. Whatever actors (engineers, programmers, professionals etc) do in their efforts to 'fix' mistrust, it continues to mutate as a social form.